Let us see how long it takes for HN to start praising nuclear power and shrug of any risks in this thread! :)
- Designing and building reactor that is demonstrably and knowingly unsafe by its own creators and other scientists
- Building it in the cash starved near collapse Soviet Union in a satellite state
- Having technicians carry out tests that are known to be unsafe for the sake of it
- Lying and attempt to cover up the issue because your entire power structure is all about saving face
What am I saying? Of course Chernobyl would've still happened!
I'm not particularly invested in if nuclear power is good or bad but holding up Chernobyl as a snarky "watch as the nerds ignore THIS!" is a herring so unimaginably red that it beggars belief
Should only collapse-proof nations build nuclear plants? If it looks like a collapse is coming, should they decommission them early?
I get the better tech arguments-- those are solid. But this idea that they were dumb and we're smart is, I guarantee you, the same exact idea they had at Chernobyl. The whole reason they wanted to save face so much is because the whole thing was built on that idea.
The same could be said for Boeing, etc., but that doesn’t mean we need to abandon air travel. We just need better leadership in safety critical organizations.
The cold war suggests Russia is anything but dumb. And as those bullets demonstrate, they where smart enough to know better - but the problem with the Soviet Union was not that it collapsed (or was unstable), but that it wasn't transparent - it cared more about the image of functionality than actual functionality.
To have credit, you have to look good. To look good, you have to hide the bad under the mantle and show how much you can do with so little! In a way, soviet russia was more productivist than any company ever was and will ever be.
There are a lot of ways governments can harm the environment on purpose using tools that are generally helpful.
Like all energy sources, there are risks and there are solutions to mitigate these risks. And I don't know any sane proponent of nuclear energy that think that we should ignore the lessons learned.
Same for airplane accidents vs car accidents.
We know how to build safe nuclear plants. We should do that, and also make sure there’s enough independent oversight to make sure they’re not being managed by people actively trying to melt them down.